Records requests increasing for the NSA

More U.S. citizens are requesting that the National Security Administration provide them with information regarding whether or not they have been spied on.

When Edward Snowden broke the news about the government's extensive spying program, many citizens were shocked and angered. While some have left their response at that, others have sought to see just how extensive this surveillance has been. U.S. citizens have the power to ask the NSA about the extent to which they have been spied upon through an open-records request.

Requests spike
In fact, many American have done so as a direct result of these revelations. According to USA Today, these requests have grown by 888 percent in the past fiscal year. From October to December 2012, the NSA received only 257 open-records requests, with even less the following quarter. However, when the third fiscal quarter hit, this number spiked to 1,302 requests.

These requests have swamped many at the NSA, however, the response to citizen requests have been less than satisfying, according to the news source. If people have received a response, it has been in the form of a standard letter that does not confirm whether or not a person's data has been gathered.

Protecting information
While some citizens are concerned about the data that has already gathered about them, some Internet organizations are taking measures to protect their users data moving into the future.

According to Computing, a publication from the United Kingdom, Yahoo has plans to encrypt all of its users' data by March 2014. The Internet firm was among other giants such as Apple and Google that received thousands of request from the PRISM program. Further, other documents showed that the NSA had accessed Yahoo's datacenters without permissions to further gather information.

For this reason, the company is looking to protect all of its users' data going forward. The company also plans encrypt all of the information that moves between its data centers. In doing so, Yahoo will make this information more difficult to access and hopefully prevent such NSA programs in the future.

These practices are encouraging to the future of information online, however, the actions of the NSA are not. Now that these surveillance practices are well known, many feel that the government body should own up to these practices and inform citizens of the information that has been gathered about them.